Around 1,000 start-ups and other innovative companies will receive grants from a new €100 million funding round from the European Commission’s Future Internet Public-Private-Partnership to develop apps and other digital services, in areas such as transport, health, smart manufacturing, energy and media.
“I promised action at Le Web in Paris last December and now I’m delivering,” said European Commission vice-president, Neelie Kroes. “We need more innovation and a more digital economy in Europe and that starts with a better ecosystem for start-ups. We’re putting our money where our mouth is.”
This third stage of the partnership’s funding aims to develop new Internet applications and services for a wide range of areas. Funding will be channelled through 20 consortia – teams from the internet ecosystem – which includes: accelerators, crowd-funding platforms, venture capitalists, co-working spaces, regional funding organisations, technology companies and SME associations, technology companies. The successful consortia will be selected according to how they plan to maximise the economic impact of their funding across the internet eco-system.
The services and apps will be built around the technologies developed in Commission’s Future Internet Public-Private Partnership (PPP) programme.
This funding announcement is the third and final call of the Future Internet PPP, a €500 million partnership launched in 2011 to help businesses and governments capitalise on the mobile internet and data revolution and to spur innovation and jobs in Europe's digital industries.
The Future Internet PPP is working to make infrastructures and business processes more intelligent, more efficient and more sustainable through tighter integration with internet networking and computing capabilities. The PPP looks at different sectors such as transport, health, media, smart manufacturing and energy.
It defines possible innovative business models for these sectors and has developed unique European technologies and the building blocks for tools and services in areas such as cloud, smart cities, big data and the ‘internet of things’. Five large scale trials started in 2013 to validate the technologies developed in real user settings. The sector-specific platforms developed by these trials will be made available to SMEs and web-entrepreneurs to develop services and applications.
This funding also forms part of the Commission’s StartUp Europe plan for accelerating, connecting and celebrating European entrepreneurship ecosystems so that tech start-ups not only start in Europe, but stay in Europe.